M.Y. Ivory – författare

The web plays a significant role in the everyday life of people, yet many sites have inadequate usability and accessibility. Automated evaluation has gained prominence as a way to help web site builders to produce more usable and accessible sites. But what does it mean to automate web site evaluation? How effective are automated evaluation approaches and tools? Where do they fit into web practitioners' work practices? This book is a culmination of over five years of Melody Ivory's research and practical experience in the Web domain. It is an in-depth look at automated web site evaluation methodologies and existing software tools from both the researcher's and practitioner's perspectives. Ivory documents the current state of the field in 2003 and highlights promising research and tool development directions. She summarizes surveys and analyses of automated web site evaluation methodologies and tools, describes a novel automated evaluation approach that she developed (the WebTango approach), and presents results from empirical studies of automated evaluation tools and of the web site design process itself.She discusses the role of automated evaluation tools in practitioners' work practices, reports on tool usage, and compares tools along several dimensions.

Among all information systems that are nowadays available, web sites are definitely the ones having the widest potential audience and the most significant impact on the everyday life of people. Web sites contribute largely to the information society: they provide visitors with a large array of services and information and allow them to perform various tasks without prior assumptions about their computer literacy. Web sites are assumed to be accessible and usable to the widest possible audience. Consequently, usability has been recognized as a critical success factor for web sites of every kind. Beyond this universal recognition, usability still remains a notion that is hard to grasp. Summative evaluation methods have been introduced to identify potential usability problems to assess the quality of web sites. However, summative evaluation remains limited in impact as it does not necessarily deliver constructive comments to web site designers and developers on how to solve the usability problems. Formative evaluation methods have been introduced to address this issue. Evaluation remains a process that is hard to drive and perform, while its potential impact is probably maximal for the benefit of the final user. This complexity is exacerbated when web sites are very large, potentially up to several hundreds of thousands of pages, thus leading to a situation where eval­ uating the web site is almost impossible to conduct manually. Therefore, many attempts have been made to support evaluation with: • Models that capture some characteristics of the web site of interest.